Hi there, I'm Shannon, and I'm one of the newer members of the Octopus team.

I love puzzles and building things, so it's hardly suprising I ended up building software for a living. I started my coding career like many others, as a kid on a Commodore 64 and I've been writing software commercially now for a bit over 20 years.

Life hasn't all been about coding though, over the last 15 years I've also renovated a house and built a family. The family are all pretty active and we love to get out and enjoy the great Australian outdoors.

I've worked for a number of companies and on many projects over the years. Something I learnt along the way was that build quality and ease of getting code to Production was something that was very high on my priority list. Octopus has been a standard on all my projects for a long while, and having the opportunity to join the team and contribute to it is something that has me pretty excited.

A brief reflection

I actually started in May, so given it's been a couple of months I thought I'd also share a quick reflection.

In the time since I joined Rob Pearson has talked about his first year at Octopus, and looking back over my first couple of months a few of the things he talked about really resonate. The Trust and "We are Octopus!" culture are immediately obvious when you join the team and the management style very much encourages input from everyone on decisions and direction.

As I mentioned above, I love building things. After a number of years working for consulting companies, something I came to ask myself was "Do I love building someone else's things?" The answer to that question changed over time and it became an important part of my decision to join Octopus. So what's stood out most for me from day 1 is very much "we are building our thing".